Visitors to the Oregon Jamboree this past weekend were greeted by some other newcomers to town: the Burger Family, stationed outside Sweet Home’s historic A&W drive-in on Main Street.
The Burgers’ presence outside the restaurant was the culmination of years of effort by owner Josh Hankins to procure the iconic figures that once graced A&Ws across the land.
Hankins, who has owned the local A&W with his wife Patty since 1999, said he first got the idea of acquiring a set of the Burgers when he started attending franchise board meetings in Kentucky back in the early days.
“I met several people, including Pete Knight down in Lodi,” he said. Lodi, Calif., was where A&W, based around its trademark root beer, was founded in 1919.
“Pete owns the Lodi location and he had a full set down there,” Hankins said, adding that Knight had assisted others in locating Burger family members.
According to RoadsideAmerica.com, billed as “Your Online Guide to Offbeat Tourist Attractions,” the Burger family was part of a trend in the 1960s to use cartoon characters such as the Burgers, Burger Giant, Big Barney, etc. to sell hamburgers.
“They weren’t meant to be remembered,” the website states. “They were meant to put you in a happy mood to buy hamburgers.”
Burger Family members Papa, Mama and Baby Burger were originally pictured on A&W packaging, but in 1960 the chain designated them as its mascots, adding Teen Burger in 1963.
Hankins said he thinks about 200 sets of the fiberglass mascots were produced in the early 1960s. According to RoadsideAmerica, that meant every 10th restaurant would have been able to display one or more statues.
Then, in 1974, A&W decided to introduce Rooty, the A&W Great Root Bear.
Mark Smith, a Burger Family statue collector who’s done research into the history, told Roadside America that the corporate headquarters issued orders to destroy the Burger Family mascots.
“They were told, ‘The Bear’s the thing now. We’re going with this Bear. So get rid of all the Family members,'” Smith was quoted as saying.
Some 50 of the 1,100 original statues are still on display and others may be in storage or private collections, according to RoadsideAmerica.
“I thought that’d be fun to do here, you know, given that we’re an older store,” Hankins said.
In 2021 he made a bid for the Teen statue outside Shirley May’s restaurant on Highway 20 between Lebanon and Albany. Shirley May’s was closing and Hankins contacted the owner of the property to see if he was willing to let the statue go.
“He just wanted more money than I was willing to pay,” Hankins said.
He also found the full family in St. James, Mo., but “I got outbid by another franchisee in Wisconsin.”
Knight had been scouting around for him and last spring he contacted Hankins, reporting that he’d located three of the family in Turlock, Calif., not far from Lodi. The statues were in the possession of the son of the owner of an A&W that had been shut down.
“I think his father had passed away, but at (the son’s) home in Turlock, he had a kind of a lean-to shed on the side of his house and in there was the Papa, the Mom and the Teen.”
Hankins and his brother Cyrus flew down and rented a U-haul, into which Knight helped them load up the statues, along with “a mug froster and probably 100 old A&W mugs” which he and Knight split between them.
They loaded up and headed up the freeway.
Arriving in Sweet Home, Hankins pressure washed the statues so he could feature them on his A&W float in the 2024 Sportsman’s Holiday parade.
Then he turned them over to a friend, owner of John Ridgeway’s Auto Body Shop.
“He really wanted to do it. He wanted to be involved,” Hankins said.
Ridgeway cleaned the statues and repaired some minor damage to the fiberglass. Then he painted the statues with weather-resistant automotive paint.
“He was trying to fit them in around his regular stuff, where he’s doing classic cars,” Hankins said. “It took a little bit to get through that process. And then, that whole time, we had been looking for the fourth statue, the Baby.”
Hankins had a construction company build concrete pedestals for the statues, including the one he didn’t yet have.
“I was pretty confident we could get one or create one.”
Finding the Baby was turning out to be an even stiffer challenge than procuring the other three.
Hankins said he “started emailing people” and connected with a Canada-based “nostalgia Facebook group.” Eventually, another collector in Illinois, who had a couple of the figures, contacted him and told him someone had offered him $5,000 for a Baby Burger statue.
“I said, ‘Well, that seems kind of steep, to be honest,’” Hankins said. “That kind of fizzled out.”
Just a month before this year’s Oregon Jamboree, he’d finally resigned himself to creating his own Baby Burger.
A friend of his in Visalia, Calif., had a Baby statue and Hankins arranged to travel to the Bay Area and drive to Visalia, south of Fresno, to borrow the statue, bring it to Sweet Home and have a friend who owns a fiberglass fabrication company make a mold and create a statue from that.
Then he got a break. One evening, a few days before his family was scheduled to leave on that trip, Hankins got a text message from a friend: “Isn’t this the statue that you need?”
It was located in Orange, in Southern California.
“I jumped on eBay and bought it.”
He switched his travel plans to fly to Southern California instead and changed his U-Haul reservation.
The other good news was that the Baby statue had been completely refurbished.
“It was in really nice shape,” Hankins said, though her dress was red and he wanted it to be orange, to match the others.
“So I told John (Ridgeway), ‘Do you have time to do this?’ I really wanted to put those up before the Jamboree. He says, ‘Yeah, bring it over.’”
Ridgeway got Baby painted early last week and when she was dry they loaded the statues on a flatbed trailer and hauled them down to the restaurant after it closed on Tuesday night.
Patti Hankins, surveying the figures Wednesday afternoon after they were installed, said they were drawing views.
“We’ve had people stopping and taking pictures and honking all day,” she said.